An American Lion

When you think back over the last few years, it strikes me as peculiar that anyone would be surprised at the hypocrisy of the Democrat Party. When they were out of power, every misstep by the Bush Administration was the end of the world. Now that we’ve seen them run things for nearly a year, every misstep is an easy-to-justify “blip” that “won’t happen again.”

In politics, hypocrisy is all in the eye of the beholder. If you’re a down-the-line Independent like myself, you can’t help but smile when they trot out their justifications for things. I’m speaking of both parties. I don’t find anything in either party to inspire me. I certainly don’t expect my government to keep me safe. I do expect them to pretend to care:

With today’s release of the Obama administration’s report on what went wrong to allow a Nigerian man to allegedly board a U.S.-bound flight with explosives, top government officials including [Michael] Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will face increased scrutiny.

According to the Web site of the National Counterterrorism Center, the NCTC has two core missions: “The first is to serve as the primary organization in the U.S. government for analysis and integration of all terrorism intelligence. In this role Mr. Leiter reports to Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence. The second mission is to conduct strategic operational planning for counterterrorism activities integrating all elements of U.S. national power. In this role he reports to President Obama.”

The New York Daily News reports today that Leiter, who was originally appointed to his position by President George W. Bush, didn’t cut short his ski vacation after suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was taken into custody. “It is our policy to not make our director’s schedule available to the public,” center spokesman Carl Kropf said in an e-mail to the newspaper.

That’s what a man who believes that he cannot be fired does.

He shrugs, and keeps having fun. Your safety and security are none of his concern, even though he’s getting paid to make it his concern.

When you have a position like that, one of the trade-offs is, you have to be ready to show the flag and you have to end vacations and the like in order to give the appearance of caring. You might actually care, I don’t deny that. You might actually have more than a passing concern. But when you are hot shit that cannot be fired, you strut around and tell others to pound sand. When you cannot even make a token effort to pretend to represent yourself as a steward of public safety, that’s when you might as well start looking at private sector opportunities.

And this also speaks to another issue. When people defend President Obama, do they forget that he kept a significant number of Bush appointees? That he kept over 50 of the Bush-era Justice Department U.S. Attorneys in place (the rest of the 93 U.S. Attorneys simply resigned to go do other things) speaks volumes.